PHILADELPHIA — Decades of touring — with and without Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band —
have helped make rocker and actor Steven Van Zandt at home all over the world.

Yet he never expected to be quite so big in Norway.

The credit goes to
Lilyhammer, the series in which Van Zandt appears as an American mobster in witness
protection who asks to be relocated to Lillehammer, Norway (because he liked what he saw during the
1994 Winter Olympics).

It remains a hit in Norway, where it is produced and where the premiere of the second season in
late October attracted a 51.9 percent share of the televisions in use.

The show, the first Netflix original, represented a leap as well for leaders of the Norwegian
state network, NRK — where “They tend to favor putting a camera on the front of a ship and people
watching it for 24 hours at a time,” a laughing Van Zandt said during a recent phone interview.

“It’s radical, the content,” he said of
Lilyhammer, in which his character struggles with customs while building a criminal
enterprise.

“You know, any kind of violence, they really are quite averse to. And, you know, that type of
criminal behavior, especially from the star, is quite unusual.”

Van Zandt is a writer and producer (and, this season, also the music producer).

The show has begun dealing with more than the eccentricities of Norway — as with an episode
focused on racism and immigration.

“It’s a wonderful sort of way to express that sort of racism that is cleverly hidden or not even
cleverly hidden,” Van Zandt said. “The culture thinks it is above it and immune to it. But, of
course, no culture is.”